Livin' and Dion: Welcome to the rail trail, enjoy the turtles, swans and ineptitude

Sunday

Sep 24, 2017 at 12:01 AM

Anybody can screw something up, and badly, but to screw things up the Fall River way requires government participation.

Marc Munroe Dion Herald News Staff Reporter

There’s screwing things up, and there’s screwing things up the Fall River way. Anybody can screw something up, and badly, but to screw things up the Fall River way requires government participation.

Take a look at the Quequechan River Rail Trail, Fall River’s latest effort to “have nice things.”

Out on the rail trail, where turtles bask on logs and swans swim majestically, out there where the grass grows and the water flows, it’s pretty easy to pretend you’re in Bristol, or Barrington, or some other place where the houses are single family and the families are dual income.

Oh, and by “dual income,” I don’t mean you lift boxes at Amazon and your wife makes coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts. By “dual income,” I mean that your wife is an administrator in a suburban school system and you are a Realtor specializing in houses that are not in Fall River.

Ever see the bike/walking trail in Bristol? You go out there, and it’s a bunch of two-parent families whose kids have straight teeth and bright futures, and some dude pedals by and he has a man bun, and his girlfriend says to him, “C’mon, Cameron, let’s go get a smoothie.”

Isn’t that what you want? Of course it’s what you want. It’s what everyone in America wants. It’s what I want, and I don’t even own a bicycle. In fact, like a lot of people in Fall River, if I see a grown man riding a bicycle, I assume he lost his driver’s license for DUI, but he still has a job, and it’s within biking distance.

Despite pervasive and continuous image problems, we did it. Brave little Fall River, bad joke of the Commonwealth, came up with a bike/walking trail.

If I seem cynical, it’s because the morning I wrote this, police were called to the corner of Bedford and Orange streets where, according to the scanner, a man and woman were standing on the sidewalk asking people walking by if they had any Xanax.

But despite Xanax panhandlers, Fall River built its bike/walking trail, and it’s beautiful.

If you’re really cynical about Fall River, when the trail opened, you said, “Wait’ll somebody gets killed out there.”

Which has not happened yet.

Every time I went out on the rail trail, it was relatively clean and quiet and people were enjoying themselves in a quiet, Bristol-ish fashion. There was a small problem with people stealing turtles from the river, but either it stopped, or we all got used to it, or they ran out of turtles. Whatever happened, it became less of an issue, finally disappearing altogether.

And there was an issue about police call boxes not working on the trail, but that didn’t last long, either.

I took that stuff as it came at me, and I remained a hopeful columnist.

The theory was (and is) that rail trails, and streetscapes, and “luxury apartments” in old mills, bring in college-educated money-earners who think old mills are “cool” because their mothers never sweated in one. They demand better city services, better bars, better restaurants, cleaner streets and better schools. We all benefit. Soon, your wife will be working in the kind of coffee shop where people leave tips.

But, even as folks went all Bristol on the rail trail, the City Council was voting to let a business build a road that would cut through the trail. They voted for it unanimously, too.

Hell, I don’t blame the business owner. He wants a road, he fills out the paperwork, he gets a road. I blame the City Council because, quite frankly, it doesn’t seem as though they really knew what they were doing when they voted. Hey, it was late, there was a lot on the agenda, and the request was all full of, like, big words and stuff. What do you want from these people?

Of course, seven months after that vote, people who love the trail figured out what was going to happen, and they demanded to speak to Mayor Jasiel Correia. This is an election year, so Correia gave up early and completely. If the people don’t want the road, the road will not be built, he said, taking the side of the people seven months after the city took the developer’s side.

The council’s gonna vote again. The developer meanwhile, has just discovered what it means to be “Fall River-ed.”

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